Poles Hotly Debate Treatment Of Jews

Holocaust Culpability Is A Key Issue

WARSAW — Twenty years after Poland`s communist rulers launched an anti-Semitic crusade that drove thousands of Jews out of the country, party leaders have publicly denounced the campaign.

The official denunciation of the 1968 purge, issued March 2 in the Communist Party newspaper, Trybuna Ludu, coincides with government

preparations for a lavish, weeklong commemoration of the 45th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising against the Nazis. About 4,500 Jews from Israel, the United States and other nations are expected to attend the ceremonies April 14-20.

Why the recent focus on Jews here? The answer is as complex and conflicting as the hypersensitive issue itself.

The subject intruded into the national consciousness in January, 1987, with the publication of an unprecedented article by literary critic Jan Blonski in the nation`s most influential Roman Catholic newspaper, Tygodnik Powszechny.

Blonski`s article, breaking four decades of silence, directly confronted a previously taboo topic: whether Poles carry any special moral responsibility for the Nazi murder of 3 million Polish Jews at death camps on Polish soil.

Blonski distinguished between full culpability for the Holocaust, which lies with the Nazis, and the moral responsibility for Poles to deal with the Holocaust and how it affected their country.

The article prompted a heated debate that continues today. That debate includes hundreds of articles and letters-some anti-Semitic, but many soul-searching appeals for Poles to examine the ethical question posed during World War II: whether they should have helped the Jews, even though that could have meant imprisonment or death at the hands of the Nazis.

The issue surfaced again last month when the government of Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski announced plans to reassess what was known euphemistically as only ``the March `68 events.``

The ``events,`` prompted by infighting among party members jockeying to oust Polish leader Wladyslaw Gomulka, included widespread expulsions of Jews from the Communist Party, dismissals of Jews from state jobs and official posts and vitriolic anti-Semitic attacks in the press.

It was the worst outbreak of anti-Semitism in Poland since a 1946 pogrom in Kielce, south of Warsaw, in which 42 Jews were murdered. About 20,000 Jews emigrated because of the 1968 campaign, leaving only 5,000 to 8,000 Jews in the nation that before World War II had more than 3 million Jewish residents. The party`s official denunciation of the 1968 purge says the reassessment was ordered because of a ``determination to learn from the history of socialist Poland.``

Similarly, government authorities say the ghetto uprising anniversary ceremony on April 19 is being organized to pay tribute to Jewish heroes who waged a futile fight against the Nazis. Authorities say the commemoration also will mark 1,000 years of cohabitation by Poles and Jews.

Many of the Jews left in Poland today take a more cynical view, dismissing the reappraisal because the party refuses to accept full responsibility for the purge.

The Trybuna Ludu reappraisal denounced anti-Semitism as ``unequivocally negative`` on moral and political grounds. The paper said the purge clashed with Marxist-Leninist ideology and the Polish tradition of tolerance, fomented discrimination, harmed many people personally and damaged the nation`s intellectual life and international prestige.

But the newspaper also insisted that ``the overwhelming majority of party and state activists had nothing to do with anti-Semitism.``

``It should be stated firmly that the party as a whole and its leadership have counteracted the development of anti-Semitic sentiment in Poland, although this was done not always on time and not always effectively enough,`` it maintained.

Dr. Marek Edelman, the only survivor of the ghetto uprising who still lives in Poland, rejects the official reappraisal as meaningless and said other Polish Jews he knows feel the same.

``This is just politics,`` he said. ``There is no true sorrow (on the part of the Communist Party). There are no regrets, no rehabilitation, no invitations to people who were forced to leave to come home.``

Edelman, who lives in Lodz, rejected the party`s denial of responsibility for the 1968 purge, which temporarily cost him his job as a cardiologist.

``It simply could not have happened without the top party people being involved,`` he said.

Edelman, one of the leaders of the Jewish underground command in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, said he had no plans to attend the anniversary ceremonies.

``This commemoration is planned for the same reason as the Trybuna Ludu article was written-building the Polish image in the world,`` he said. ``After martial law they have to try to re-establish their contacts with other governments.``

Other Polish Jews interviewed, who asked to remain anonymous, said they viewed the government`s moves as attempts to repair relations with Washington. They suggested the government was hoping its initiative might improve its chances of getting desperately needed credits from Western banks.

One Western diplomat stationed in Warsaw said that, while such skepticism was correct in one sense, it ignored the real significance of the rethinking underway.

``Poles are now discussing the 1,000-year relationship between Poles and Jews and the guilt or lack of guilt for what occurred on Polish lands in the Second World War,`` he said, in a reference to the millions, both Jewish and gentile, who died in the concentration camps.

``A Communist Party trying to establish itself as credible with its people is not necessarily negative,`` he said. ``That`s a new idea in this part of the world.``